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Eat to Beat Heart DiseaseA diagnosis of diabetes – or pre-diabetes means the insulin in your body is not doing its job adequately. Insulin is a hormone that moves sugar from your bloodstream into the cells of your body, among other functions. It acts like a key, opening the door to the cells and allows nutrients inside. When insulin arrives at the cell’s surface and opens the door, glucose is able to enter the cell, which uses it for energy.
If for some reason your body is not making insulin, the result is rising blood glucose levels. Similarly, your blood glucose rises if your cells resist insulin’s actions – the key goes in the lock, but the door will not open. Over the long run, high blood glucose levels can damage your nerves, eyes, kidneys, and other parts of your body.
Diabetes comes in three main types, called type 1, type 2 and Gestational diabetes.
Type 1 Diabetes
This usually manifests in childhood or young adulthood. It used to be called childhood-onset or insulin-dependent diabetes. In type-1 diabetes, something has damaged the pancreas’s ability to produce insulin, and you need to get it from an outside source- typically by injection. However, recent research has revealed a great deal about how diet changes can dramatically reduce the risk that diabetes will bring your way.
In addition, we know more than ever about the causes of the disease, arming us with more power to prevent it. The damage to the insulin producing cells is caused by the biological equivalent of “friendly fire.” That is, it is caused by the body’s immune system – our white blood cells that are supposed to fight bacteria and viruses. These cells ought to protect you, but instead they have attacked the cells of the pancreas, destroying its ability to produce insulin. It may surprise you to learn that foods – particularly the food infants are fed within the first months of life- are the leading suspects!
Type 2 Diabetes
It used to be called adult-onset diabetes or sometimes non-insulin dependent diabetes. About 9 out of 10 people with diabetes have type-2 diabetes. Most people with this form of disease still produce insulin; the problem is that their cells resist it; this is called “Insulin Resistance”. Insulin tries to bring glucose into the cells, but the cells respond like a door with a malfunctioning lock. In response to these sluggish cells, your body produces more and more insulin, trying to overcome the resistance. If the body’s insulin supply cannot overcome the resistance, glucose simply builds up in your blood.
Diabetes drugs work to counteract this problem: Some make your cells more responsive to insulin. Others cause your pancreas to release more insulin into the bloodstream or block your liver from sending extra glucose into the blood.
Until now, most diabetes diets have tried to compensate for the cells resistance to insulin’s action, too. They limit the amount of sugar in your diet. They also limit starch (complex carbohydrates) because starch is actually made of glucose molecules joined together in a chain. During digestion, starch breaks down to release natural sugar into the blood. The idea is that if you do not get too much carbohydrate at any one time, your cells will not be overwhelmed with too much glucose. For people on medicarions, typical diet plans to keep the amount of glucose or starch fairly constant from meal to meal and from day to day so the amount of medication required to help your body process glucose – your daily dosage – can stay the same, too. In short, these diets guide you on what, when, and how much to eat.
New research has changed everything, however. We can now use diet changes to influence insulin sensitivity directly. So, as you will discover in the Prakritika “Eat to Beat Diabetes” program, the nutrition prescription has been completely rewritten to take advantage of this new understanding.
Gestational Diabetes
This is similar to type 2 diabetes except that it occurs during pregnancy. While it typically disappears after childbirth, it is a sign of insulin resistance, and that means that type 2 diabetes may be around the corner. With the sorts of steps that tackle type 2 diabetes, we can often stop gestational diabetes from ever turning into type 3 diabetes.
Genes are NOT your DESTINY
Diabetes runs in families, but don’t take that to mean that if one of your parents has diabetes, a similar diagnosis has to be your fate as well, you can change things.
Let’s take a look at type 1 diabetes first. Many children are born with genes that make it possible for them to develop type-1 diabetes, but most of them never do. In fact, even among identical twins, when one twin has type 1 diabetes, the other has less than a 40 percent chance of having it! What makes the difference; apparently, it is the environment, particularly the foods the child is exposed to early in life, viral infections, and perhaps other factors.
Genes play a similar role in type 2 diabetes. Many years before diabetes manifests, special tests can detect insulin resistance in young adults who have inherited a tendency towards type 2 diabetes from their parents. If they ate the same kind of foods their parents did, they are very likely headed for a diagnosis. Abundant evidence shows, however that changes in diet and lifestyle can cut the odds that diabetes will occur, diet can dramatically alter its course.
The point is this: Some genes are dictators, and others are not. The genes for hair colour or eye colour, for example, really are dictators. If they call for you to have brown hair or blue eyes, you can’t argue. But the genes for diabetes are more like committees. They do not give orders; they take suggestions.
If our genes call for diabetes, we do not necessarily have to listen to them. We have more control than you might think!
Diabetic diets
All doctors and dietitians recognize that if you have diabetes, your body does not process sugar very well, which is to say that the amount of sugar in your blood stream is too high. Researchers learned long ago that if it stays high, you are at risk for many health problems down the road.
To lower your blood sugar, most medical professionals are likely to prescribe a diet that includes very little sugar. They will ask you to limit starchy foods – such as bread, potatoes, rice, pasta – because in your digestive track, starch breaks apart to release sugar (that is, glucose). It seems to make sense – if your body cannot handle sugar and anything that turns into it. Your medical team will also encourage you to space out your intake of starches and sugars throughout the day – and from one day to the next- so that it stays fairly over time. Diabetes diets also generally cut calories to help you to lose weight and limit certain fats to reduce the risk of heart disease and other complications. That in a nutshell, is a typical “traditional” diabetes diet.
It is certainly logical, and some people greatly benefit from following it. The problem is that for most people, this sort of diet change has only a very limited effect. Weight loss is usually modest, and the diet alone typically is not enough to bring blood sugar under control.
Sooner or later, you and your doctor are likely to decide that the “diabetic diet” is not helping very much, and your doctor will add various drugs. You may need one, two, or even three different oral medications. Eventually your doctor may consider adding insulin injections. And because many people with diabetes also have high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels, doctors often add medications to tackle these problems too. Instead of helping you reduce or avoid medication, the diet seems to be a stepping- stone on the way to an ever-increasing list of drugs.
Would it not be better if we can introduce a diet and lifestyle that can help your doctors in managing your diabetes in a better way, where when food is used as medicine, the body can start to heal itself and increase insulin sensitivity, clearing out the toxins in your body in a healthy way thereby paving the way for reduction and sometimes even elimination of your medications and other related complications. Such a diet and lifestyle plan has been implemented by thousands of people all over the world. It is scientifically proven and researched and has shown tremendous potential in healing diabetes. Give us a call to find out more about this revolutionary diet program today.